Introduction

As you develop your presentation, an important element needs to be considered: the look of your slides. The design of your
presentation is just as important as the information that it contains. A poorly designed presentation without the eye-catching
design elements will lose your audience, and then what your presentation has to say won’t really matter.

Microsoft PowerPoint comes with professionally designed templates to help you create a consistent presentation look. A template
is a presentation file that consists of one or more slide masters. A slide master is the part of a template that contains all of the properties of your PowerPoint presentation—slide layouts, themes, effects,
animation, backgrounds, text font style and color, date and time, and graphic placement. Each slide master contains one or
more slide layouts, which defines the positioning and formatting of content on a slide. Layouts contain placeholders, which
hold and format future text and other slide content, such as slide numbers, date, time, and headers and footers.

Besides the text and graphics that you place on your slides, another important part of a presentation is the use of color.
Not everyone has an eye for color, and pulling it all together can be daunting, so PowerPoint provides you with professionally
designed color themes, which you can apply to any slide master. A theme is a set of unified design elements that provides a consistent look for a presentation by using color themes, fonts, and
effects, such as shadows, shading, and animations.

Once you’ve set up your masters and themes to be exactly the way you want them, you can save it as a design template. Company
specific styles, logos, colors themes and other elements, can now become a new template to be used with other presentations
in the future.